newspaper ciirculation continues to drop

I was surprised when the 1990's ended and I discovered that programmers did not tend to read much anymore.

Computer sections of bookstores and magazine stands grew like mad during the 1990's. However, both of these shrunk rapidly in the 2000's.

I remember having favorite book series in the 1970's through the 1990's. My fiction reading really dropped off with the new millennium. I rarely hear people talk about a book or an area of interest they are reading at home.

Each of my parents had a close relative who was an English teacher. Another relative wrote marketing books and advertisements.

This week, I read that Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) had said that people do not read anymore. I think he slightly exaggerated but the truth is that people in the US do not seem to read like they did.

Last month, Bloomberg reported the circulation numbers for 25 major newspapers, and how much each one had dropped. The changes were huge. I hope the papers are making up for it with profit from publishing on the web.

Wall Street Journal tops the list with two million circulation and 0.6% increase this year from last. USA, now the number two on the list had just under two million circulation and a 17.2% decrease.

In fact, everything on the list but WSJ decreased significantly. Most newspapers listed dropped their circulation ten to twenty percent this year. Two papers dropped theirs 22.2%.

I kind of wonder what the impact of using less paper, ink, and paper boys having fewer subscribers is these days. My father, my brother, and I - all three, delivered a newspaper as children.

Kids might not notice the change much. A sudden drop in paper and ink consumption is probably being noticed in a lot of American households. It is probably great for the environment but it must be hard on those families who work in those industries, especially in these times.

Going back to the huge drop in newspaper circulation, the big drop this year on the heels of a long decline is pretty sobering.

Granted, people read the news a lot more on the web than they did in the 1990's and reading the news online was rare before that. So, I realize a lot of eyes went from paper to online.

TV news viewership is down too. Cable and broadcast network news was a staple. Now, much of broadcasts is on a news topic but not on the facts of it but on opinions and reactions to it. Basically, a lot of the televised news now is just about emotion.

I think we are dumbing ourselves down now. Hopefully, some innovation or custom will come along and change this. The web is becoming the last bastion of readership. I hope it is a good one.

Adobe web browser plugins fail safety test again

Adobe Acrobat Reader and the beloved and hated (depending on who you talk to) Flash plugins are once again to blame for a deluge in malware infections and some serious computer crime.

Gumblar Trojan, yet another un-killable Microsoft Windows malware that keeps getting resurrected is once again hacking PCs.

Gumbar exploits flaws in the commonly installed plugins to control user's PCs. PC users and vendors are slow to wake up to the risk this poses. Even Microsoft installed them in the PCs it sells under its "Microsoft signature" brand in its new retail and online stores. The term "Microsoft signature" might begin to take on an ominious double meaning.

Is there any new softwar Windows users can get to protect them from these browser exploits?

Probably not.

The solution is obvious and far less painful to them than the legion of advertisers, hackers, and web developers that are one way or another trying to take advantage of them and their PC.

Instead of continually adding software to their web browser, they need to control, disable, or remove it.

Adobe Acrobat actually works much, much better if you install the Reader without instealling the plugin. The plugin makes the content load in the web browser. That is bad. It makes the browser hang, pause, and freeze at various times. Sometimes the browser hangs and one has to crash out of it. So remove that plugin and never install it again.

Flash is a beloved tool of hackers and in your face advertisers. Those popups that your Block Popups browser feature does not work on it. Get rid of the Flash plugin and you will not get those stupid popup ads anymore.

The best way to get rid of Flash is probably to simply disable it in your browser. Not sure if IE allows this but Firefox certainly does. Spend more qualiity browsing time with Firefox if you want to be happy.

Now, some people find that there might be some web site they actually want to view Flash content on. For instance, YouTube has most though certainly not all content in Flash format. Enabling Flash for only YouTube is not only possible, it is easy, if you do not mind downloading a Firefox extenion.

Download Noscript and install it. Firefox lets you do this directly from inside the browser.

After installing it, agree that yes, you want the browser to restart if it asks.

When you visit sites, if Flash content yyou do want to show up does not, give Noscript permission to show it - if you are sure about the integrity of the file, the person who uploaded it on the server (or placed it as an ad), the web server(s) where it is hosted, and so on.

It is a serious list of questions to run through every time you grant a new site to have permission to show dynamic conent. Ten years ago, you could afford to be generous. Today, you must be miserly and make such permission a rare treat to sites.

Recently, even supposedly tech savvy sites like Microsoft advertising (hosted on an MSN site) and the Gawker/Gizmodo blogs were infected with malware. Not directly, but through ads the accepted. This has been an obvious risk for ages and has been exploited starting at least several years ago.

Since Windows is often the target, its users, vendors, and advertisers should be careful but they are obviously not careful enough. That is where you can help yourself by choosing a better web browser than IE and taking control by disabling or restricting Flash and other dangerous plugins.

If enough people choke or throttle back Flash, Adobe will get the message, improve their staffing and tasking on the Flash project, and turn it around. If everyone stops using it, then Flash will die off because no one will bother to create content in it.

Hopefully, Adobe will respond in time before that happens. Until then, there is no question that Flash is massively over used on the web, and harms performance and security. The problems it has had are reocurrent and hackers and rogue advertisers really like it. Flash does not really fit the web being kind of a rogue thing all on its own.

If you have a Macintosh and run Safari, you might be interested in the ClickToFlash WebKit (Safari web engine) plugin. In some ways it is even nicer than Noscript and it focuses specifically on Flash. Using it, you can sometimes view content in H.264 format which has some excellent advantages in terms of enjoyability.


Another handy tool is Adblock Plus. Firefox will assist you in finding this.

Tools > Get addons
select Adblock Plus

As before, you install the plugin and then confirm the browser request to Restart if it asks.

Adblock reduces annoyances from obtrusive ads and instrusive privacy violations. It targets certain offenders using a blacklist technique. The list is updated from time to time. This seems to work pretty well.

Not everyone is using bad mechanisms and tricks to do marketing on the web. Someday, hopefully, there will not be a need for Adblock Plus. That day is not upon us yet, however.